News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by dragonwriter on Sunday November 19, 2023 @12:02AM (#38329226)
Microsoft terminating the agreement by which they supply compute to OpenAI and OpenAI licenses technology to them would be an existential risk to OpenAI (though other competing cloud providers might step in and fill the gap Microsoft created under similar terms), but -- whether or not OpenAI ended up somewhere else immediately (the tech eventually would, even if OpenAI failed completely and was dissolved) Microsoft would go from the best positioned enterprise AI cloud provider to very far behind overnight.

And while that might hurt OpenAI as an institution more than it hurts Microsoft as an institution, the effect on Microsoft's top decision-makers personally vs. OpenAI's top decisionmakers seems likely to be the other way around.

Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by adastra22 on Sunday November 19, 2023 @12:12AM (#38329287)
Not if they invested in Sam’s new startup, under agreeable profit-focused terms this time, and all the OpenAI talent (minus Ilya) followed.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by dragonwriter on Sunday November 19, 2023 @12:19AM (#38329334)
At best, that might enable them to eventually come back, once new products are built from scratch, but that takes non-zero time.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by adastra22 on Sunday November 19, 2023 @01:24AM (#38329722)
Non-zero time, but not a lot either. Main hangup would be acquiring data for training, as their engineers would remember the parameters for GPT-4 and Microsoft would provide the GPUs. But Microsoft with access to Bing and all its other services ought to be able to help here too.

Amateurs on hugging face are able to match OpenAI in impressively short time. The actual former-OpenAI engineers with unlimited budget ought to be able to do as good or better.

Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by cteiosanu on Sunday November 19, 2023 @02:19AM (#38330045)
Amateurs ?
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by adastra22 on Sunday November 19, 2023 @02:30AM (#38330099)
Non-corporate groups.